Seventh Grade Gifted Students’ Misconceptions on “Point, Line and Plane” Concepts

Abstract

In this study, it was aimed to determine elementary seventh grade gifted students’ difficulties and misconceptions (alternative conceptions) on “point, line, line segment, ray and plane” concepts. A two-tier diagnostic test was used as a data collection instrument to figure out students’ misconceptions. The sample consisted of 28 middle-school gifted students who attended an after school program at a university campus in the spring term of the year 2008-2009. Results from this study illustrated that gifted students had some difficulties in understanding and misconceptions on “point, line, line segment, ray and plane” concepts. These misconceptions
were listed under the following five categories; misconceptions on understanding geometric concepts’ real world applications, misconceptions when using basic geometric concepts’ features in complex problem solving situations, misconceptions on understanding different forms (symbolic, visual etc.) of the same geometric concepts, misconceptions in the process of concretization of undefined geometric concepts under their models in mind, misconceptions about forgetting the main principles of concepts in the process of nested use of different geometric concepts.